Arts Festivals Summit 2019

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EFA Festival in Focus | Flanders Festival Ghent

Simon Mundy, in interview with Flanders Festival Gent’s Artistic and Managing Director, Veerle Simoens, looks at the festival’s history and current success

The concept of the Flanders Festival is
sometimes hard for outsiders to grasp but perhaps the best way to explain it is
to compare it to Belgium itself – a federal structure with each part having its
own role, speciality and tradition. The festival migrates from Flemish city to
city like an itinerant friar, stopping for a few weeks in each for a different
flavour of art and ale. Only in recent years, under the auspices of the current
EFA President, Jan Briers, has the Flanders Festival reached its present form.

The journey started in Ghent back in
1958 and that is where it stops now for the second half of September. The
original Flanders Festival was a superb piece of opportunistic thinking - it
was started because there was money left over from the World Expo held at
Heysel on the outskirts of Brussels that year (which also left the Atomium as a
permanent landmark).

These days the Ghent portion is
directed by Veerle Simoens, who has been artistic director for the last three
years but has this year become head of the management side too. Her background
has prepared her well for the role. She began as (and still is) a cellist. “I
had a piano trio with my sisters,” she told me. “The violinist dealt with the
money, the pianist looked after the repertoire and I was left with the booking,
the selling, the promotion and the website. I found I liked to organise and
sell – but then cellists are organised people. In the string quartet it is the
cellist who keeps things steady – you are always helping others!”

Feestelijk Openings Concert, Wouter Rawoens. Flanders Festival Ghent

“We had our own chamber music festival
in Antwerp for two years (2009 and 10). It was very intense. Then a chamber
orchestra asked me to manage it. We had no government support so it was very
challenging. When Ghent asked me to join as Artistic Director in 2015 I
couldn't say no. In a way it was quite comfortable just forming the programme
but I like having responsibility for the management side as well. As General
Director you have a total view and you have the flexibility to solve problems.”

As well as being the original chapter
of the Flanders Festival, Ghent is now the largest in terms of its range of
venues and repertoire. “We cover the whole city,” says Veerle, “whereas the
others tend to be confined to a more limited number of spaces or art forms.
Every city has its own needs and tastes – for example Bruges concentrates on
early music – and we respond to that. We are quite eclectic in Ghent because we
have a very broad public: from the very faithful to people who are just
discovering classical music and want to listen to it in a new context.”

Flanders Festival Ghent

Picking a few days from the 2018 programme proves Veerle's point. On a
Monday night there's the firmly traditional Ton Koopman directing Bach's Mass
in B Minor. The next night has the adventurous violinist Patricia
Kopatchinskaya joining Camerata Bern for American Jewish jazz alongside
Hartmann's Violin Concerto and Frank Martin's Polyptique – areconciliation concert highlighting those who suffered in war. A day later
sees young players from the European Youth Chamber Academy joined on stage for
Brahms and Mendelssohn by far more experienced players as part of the long-term
Generation Project. And on the Thursday there's an 'ode to peace' commemorating
the centenary of the end of the First World War that so devastated Flanders. It
comes as Distortion, A Hymn to Liberty by the composer Dirk Brossé and
singer-songwriter Frederik Sioen.

“My first love is chamber music,” says
Veerle, “and although I'm into the big Romantic repertoire, there are chamber
music concerts that you can only programme in a festival; for example it would
be hard to mark the war centenary and then look at the relationship between
music and philosophy in the normal schedule of a concert hall.” She illustrates
this with, Le Banquet, an evening in which Mériam Korichi invites eight
philosophers to discuss Plato's Symposium and its Hymn to Eros with the
help of a group of musicians. That subject was also explored by Leonard
Bernstein in Serenade, his violin concerto, of course, but this event
does not mark his centenary but fifty years since 'the summer of love', also
the year that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.

Feestelijk Openings Concert, Wouter Rawoens. Flanders Festival Ghent

The link with the European Chamber
Music Academy is an important one for Veerle. Founded in 2004 it is a network
of conservatoires, universities and festivals operating as part of the EU's
Erasmus programme for young people's education exchange – combining music with
cultural history (even the ancient rules of rhetoric). Veerle says, “I studied
as part of the Academy (though in those days we had to pretend to be German to
qualify) and it really influenced me”. However, she found it harder to persuade
audiences to put their trust in the young musicians alone when she included the
Academy in the schedule. “Now, through the Generation Project, we put them on
stage with their tutors – more famous musicians – and the tickets are selling
well because the audience decide they can trust them.”

She wants this sense of
music being able to illustrate connections with big issues to continue as a
feature of the Ghent Festival. “This year we have explored power and the way it
is misused,” she told me, “but next year I want to think the way children do,
with the freedom to use fantasy and imagination.”

OdeGand, WouterRawoens. Flanders Festival Ghent

Further
Information on the Flanders Festival Ghent

Each year, over 180 classical and world-music concerts are performed by
about 1500 (inter)national artists. Superb performances, splendid historic
locations and original concepts, like OdeGand and Parklife, never fail to
attract a 60.000-strong audience. Ghent Festival of Flanders is a member of the
Federation of Flemish Music Festival FMiV as well as of the European Festivals
Association (EFA).

In 2018, Flanders
Festival Ghent celebrates its 61st edition. The festival stands out
with a diverse, creative and high-quality programme. Each year, over 180
classical and world-music concerts are performed by about 1500 (inter)national
artists. Superb performances, splendid historic locations and original concepts,
like OdeGand, Parklife and artbeat. never
fail to attract a 60,000-strong audience. Flanders Festival Ghent is a
member of the Federation of Flemish Music Festival FMiV as well as of the
European Festival Association (EFA).

Mission statement

Flanders Festival Ghent
is an international music festival centred on a high-quality classical
repertoire but also ready to take the odd artistic risk. In Ghent and the
surrounding East-Flanders province, the Festival acts as the mortar among
cultural centres and the link between a glorious past and a fascinating
present. Reaching out to an ever wider audience, the Festival is a valuable
addition to the existing cultural scene.

Not just in downtown
Ghent

The choice of Ghent,
with its impressive architectural heritage, as the Festival’s heart was no
accident. In addition, each year, countless villages and communes in the
surrounding East Flanders province are firmly involved in this celebration of
music, now universally known as “Flanders Festival Ghent”.

The story so far…

In 1958, Jan Briers sr.
decided to set up “The Ghent Music Festival”. At the time, Briers sr. was the
head of the Flemish broadcasting corporation BRT as well as a communication
sciences professor at the universities of Ghent and Brussels. His brand-new
festival presented eight concerts that attracted a 4000-strong audience. In
1959, the initiative was rebranded to “Flanders Festival”, and seven chapters
were added to the original Ghent region.

WMS KAthedraal. Flanders Festival Ghent

Artistic direction

Flanders Festival Ghent
has become a household name both in Belgium and abroad, with a strong following
that keeps growing year after year. This growth is in large part due to the
inspiring leadership of Messrs. Jan Briers (father and son) and the oftentimes
prophetic vision of artistic directors like Gerard Mortier, Dirk Struys, Serge
Dorny, Bert Schreurs, and Jelle Dierickx. Since November 2014 Veerle Simoens is
in charge as artistic programmer and in 2016 she became artistic director.

In 1972 the Festival
staged its first large-scale happening in all of Saint Peter’s Abbey’s
available halls. The current success of “OdeGand”, the grand opening event on
and along Ghent’s canals, and “Avanti!”, a musical cycling tour along East
Flanders province’s most idyllic tracks, can therefore rightfully be considered
the continuation of a long-standing tradition. Pop and world music were quickly
added to Flanders Festival’s programme to provide an inspiring contrast and
confrontation with western classical music, which has been the staple until
this very day.

Not just Flemish
composers from the polyphonic era were unearthed to general acclaim—Flanders
Festival Ghent also spawned an impressive number of now world-famous Belgian
musicians like Philippe Herreweghe, Sigiswald Kuijken, Paul Van Nevel and Jos
van Immerseel. Obviously, the Festival also invited all major international
stars to perform in Ghent: Sir Simon Rattle, Claudio Abbado, Valery Gergiev, …